Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute

John_Maxwell

42 Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute

15th Mar 2012

2 min read

42

If you type "less wrong c" or "singularity institute c" into Google, you'll find that people are searching for "less wrong cult" and "singularity institute cult" with some frequency. (EDIT: Please avoid testing this out, so Google doesn't autocomplete your search and reinforce their positions. This kind of problem can be hard to get rid of. Click these instead: less wrong cult, singularity institute cult.)

There doesn't seem to be anyone arguing seriously that Less Wrong is a cult, but we do give some newcomers that impression.

I have several questions related to this:

Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?
If so, can you suggest any easy steps we could take?
Is it possible that there are aspects of the atmosphere here that are driving away intelligent, rationally inclined people who might otherwise be interested in Less Wrong?
Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?
Is it possible that our culture might be different if these folks were hanging around and contributing? Presumably they are disproportionately represented among certain personality types.

If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:

Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.

Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:

Some people consider the Sequences the most important work they have ever read.

Generally, if your comment or post is on-topic, thoughtful, and shows that you're familiar with the Sequences, your comment or post will be upvoted.

Many of us believe in the importance of developing qualities described in Twelve Virtues of Rationality: [insert mystical sounding description of how to be rational here]

And on the sequences page:

If you don't read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, little else on Less Wrong will make much sense.

This seems obviously false to me.

These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.

We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.

In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.

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42 Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute

by John_Maxwell

15th Mar 2012

2 min read

247

42

There doesn't seem to be anyone arguing seriously that Less Wrong is a cult, but we do give some newcomers that impression.

I have several questions related to this:

Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?
If so, can you suggest any easy steps we could take?
Is it possible that there are aspects of the atmosphere here that are driving away intelligent, rationally inclined people who might otherwise be interested in Less Wrong?
Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?
Is it possible that our culture might be different if these folks were hanging around and contributing? Presumably they are disproportionately represented among certain personality types.

If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:

Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.

Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:

Some people consider the Sequences the most important work they have ever read.

Generally, if your comment or post is on-topic, thoughtful, and shows that you're familiar with the Sequences, your comment or post will be upvoted.

Many of us believe in the importance of developing qualities described in Twelve Virtues of Rationality: [insert mystical sounding description of how to be rational here]

And on the sequences page:

If you don't read the sequences on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and Reductionism, little else on Less Wrong will make much sense.

This seems obviously false to me.

We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.

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aaronsw14y40

Offhand, can you think of a specific test that you think ought to be applied to a specific idiosyncratic view?

Well, for example, if EY is so confident that he's proven "MWI is obviously true - a proposition far simpler than the argument for supporting SIAI", he should try presenting his argument to some skeptical physicists. Instead, it appears the physicists who have happened to run across his argument found it severely flawed.

How rational is it to think that you've found a proof most physicists are wrong and then never run it by any physicists to see if you're right?

My read on your comment is: LWers don't act humble, therefore they are crackpots.

I do not believe that.

As for why SI's approach is dangerous, I think Holden put it well in the most upvoted post on the site.

I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I just find it striking.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky14y90

BTW, it's important to note that by some polls an actual majority of theoretical physicists now believe in MWI, and this was true well before I wrote anything. My only contributions are in explaining the state of the issue to nonphysicists (I am a good explainer), formalizing the gross probability-theoretic errors of some critiques of MWI (I am a domain expert at that part), and stripping off a lot of soft understatement that many physicists have to do for fear of offending sillier colleagues (i.e., they know how incredibly stupid the Copenhagen interpret... (read more)

15Mitchell_Porter14y

The criticisms at those links have nothing to do with the argument for MWI. They are just about a numerical mistake in an article illustrating how QM works. The actual argument for MWI that is presented is something like this: Physicists believe that the wavefunction is real and that it collapses on observation, because that is the first model that explained all the data, and science holds onto working models if they are falsified. But we can also explain all the data by saying that the wavefunction is real and doesn't collapse, if we learn to see the wavefunction as containing multiple worlds that are equally real. The wavefunction doesn't collapse, it just naturally spreads out into separate parts and what we see is one of those separate parts. A no-collapse theory is simpler than a collapse theory because it has one less postulate, so even though there are no new predictions, by Bayes (or is it Occam?) we can favor the no-collapse theory over the collapse theory. Therefore, there are many worlds. This is informal reasoning about which qualitative picture of the world to favor, so it is not something that can be verified or falsified by a calculation or an experiment. Therefore, it's not something that a hostile physicist could crisply debunk, even if they wanted to. In the culture of physics there are numerous qualitative issues where there is no consensus, and where people take sides on the basis of informal reasoning. Eliezer's argument is on that level; it is an expression in LW idiom, of a reason for believing in MWI that quite a few physicists probably share. It can't be rebutted by an argument along the lines that Eliezer doesn't know his physics, because it is an argument which (in another form) a physicist might actually make! So if someone wants to dispute it, they'll have to do so, just as if they were intervening in any of these informal professional disagreements which exist among physicists, by lines of argument about plausibility, future theoretic

9Eliezer Yudkowsky14y

There were plenty of physicists reading those posts when they first came out on OB (the most famous name being Scott Aaronson). Some later readers have indeed asserted that there's a problem involving a physically wrong factor of i in the first couple of posts (i.e. that's allegedly not what a half-silvered mirror does to the phase in real life), which I haven't yet corrected because I would need to verify with a trusted physicist that this was correct, and then possibly craft new illustrations instead of using the ones I found online, and this would take up too much time relative to the point that talking about a phase change of -1 instead of i so as to be faithful to real-world mirrors is an essentially trivial quibble which has no effect on any larger points. If anyone else wants to rejigger the illustration or the explanation so that it flows correctly, and get Scott Aaronson or another known trusted physicist to verify it, I'll be happy to accept the correction. Aside from that, real physicists haven't objected to any of the math, which I'm actually pretty darned proud of considering that I am not a physicist.

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